Opera Mini Web Browser
Category: Productivity
Released: April 13th, 2010
Current Version: 5.0
Size: 1 MB
Price: Free

Since the initial release of the iPhone, Safari has been the only real choice for a fully-featured web browser. That time, however, is now at and end. With the release of the Opera Mini Web Browser, iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad users now have a new option when surfing the web — and it is a good one. Opera boasts pretty much every feature that you can find in Safari and then some.

When you first open up Opera, you will notice the “Speed Dial” screen which displays a grid of 9 configurable website thumbnails to quickly and easily access the sites that you frequent. Like the contact list on your phone, you can have a long list of bookmarks, but the speed dial page allows you to choose the 9 pages you access the most for quick access. The very next thing you’re likely to discover is how much more awesome the implementation of tabs is over Safari. Switching back and forth between multiple tabs is both intuitive and easy, which is exactly how it should be. Another feature that took me a bit longer to discover was something that has been sorely lacking in Safari: The ability to save a picture from the Internet on to your phone. As someone who makes frequent use of the WordPress app, this will be quite the useful little tool. Which brings me to its speed. Everything about it just seems faster, from loading a page to switching tabs and pulling up contextual menus everything is very snappy, even if you aren’t using a 3GS. Even if everything else were on par with Safari, this alone makes Opera stand out.

The few features I just covered are by no means the definitive list. There are plenty of other great things about Opera that make it worth installing. After on a day of use, it has already supplanted Safari as the primary browser on my iPhone and is the very first 3rd party app that has earned a coveted place on my dock next to such rock-star apps as “Phone”, “Messages”, and “Mail”. If you haven’t installed it already, do so now. It is free, easy to get accustomed to, and a huge improvement over Safari.

You may not know this, but your iPhone or iPod Touch has a significantly easier method to delete content than you may have previously been aware. In Email, for example, you’re probably under the impression that you have to hit ‘Edit’ in the upper right hand corner, select the email(s) you want deleted, then choose delete.

Here’s how you make the process of deleting a single message a lot quicker:

1. With a single finger, swipe from the left side of the message to the right.
2. Tap the box named “Delete” that will appear.

There you have it, nice and easy! This works in Mail, Messages, Notes, Safari Bookmarks, and probably at a few more Apps that I am unaware of.

Late in the day yesterday Apple released a minor upgrade to it’s Safari web browser for both Mac and Windows versions, so for those of you who use it as your primary browser, as opposed to my preferred browser, it is time to upgrade. Although there are absolutely no real visual or even noticeable differences, the update patches a handful of security issues and even offers a few stability and performance enhancements. I won’t bore you with the details of exactly what was fixed, so if you want more info you can click on the following links for the security details or performance and stability updates.

The update is available through Software Update, or you can visit the Safari Download Page.